The Capital Area Food Bank, based in DC, is using Big Data, “a pioneering technology that could one day revolutionize the war on hunger,” says the Washington Post. “The synthesis of data sets has already upended the political and advertising world, introducing finely honed tools to sift out targets and potential markets in unlikely places.” The same approach helps the food bank discover pockets of need. Big Data is useful because the growth of suburbia disguises poverty and isolates the hungry from help. To find them, the food bank uses information such as the location of lower-paying, low-skill jobs.
The technology sketches the contours of what has become an emerging struggle against hunger and poverty, food bank director Nancy Roman tells the Post. “And it’s technology she hopes to export on a national level.”